Convict B 14: A Novel

by R. K. Weekes

"Come on, then. There's only just time; I've masses of letters to write before the post goes, and I know you aren't going to be hurried."

For all his quickness (and he was instinctively quick and light in every movement), Lettice found him a more considerate companion than Denis, who walked her off her legs. Their way led up through the steep hill orchard to the grassy hill-side above. Once he stopped and turned to help her over the rough ground, but when she silently avoided seeing his extended hand, he did not offer it again. Denis, rooted in his old-fashioned courtesy, had never learned to leave her alone. This was a very different type of mind; less restful, because more perceptive. When they reached the crest of the hill he pulled up. Lettice tried to persuade herself it was not done to let her get her breath, but she was quite sure it was.

"See that hedge over there?" he said, pointing across the expanse of level silvery grass. "Well, you'd never think it, but beyond that it's nothing but arable flats, beet and cabbages and potatoes, all the way to Rochehaut. Anything duller you can't imagine. And yet under this very spot where we're standing there's a cave that's never been explored, running Lord knows how deep into the hill. Stalactites and stalagmites and an underground river. I went in once with my torch, but I had to come back—too unsafe. Some day I'll have that place shored up and made accessible, and charge five francs for admission, like the caves of Han. Leg-up for the Bellevue, what? I like this sort of mixed grill, you know, wild and tame together—I like all this country. No, not that way—there's some view from the crucifix you see against the sky-line, but we haven't time for it to-night. Along here, through the wood."

Lettice looked round, before following him into the copse of starveling firs, and gorse, and ragged heather. From where they stood, a little below the crucifix, they could not see the valley; only the silvery undulating hill-side, and the evening sky, and the grasses leaning sidelong in the wind. It was lonely and bare enough to please her. "Are you going to stop here?" she asked.

"I am. D.V. What? Oh yes, I'm pious in my way, especially when I get off alone among these hills. I believe I belong here—sort of ancestral feeling; talking of which, I'll show you something rather queer at the farm when we get there. Yes, I'm going to stay, if I'm let." He walked on, twirling his stick in the air. "Last time I was up here it was with Miss O'Connor," he added irrelevantly.

Lettice was a good deal surprised; she thought she understood now why he had not wished to come alone. She had not been told, but she knew, as well from his looks as from Dorothea's headlong flight, that the explosion had come. Gardiner might keep up his laugh, that eternal laugh which grated on a sensitive ear like the squeaking of a pen, but he could not hide the change in his features, pinched and sharpened by suffering. Suffering—yes—pain: physical pain, that was what his face betrayed: not grief. His dark eyes—they were, the poet decided, like the depths of a pine-wood: dark blackish-brown, with undertones of dark green—were like those of a dog that has been run over. No one else seemed to notice anything wrong; at the pension one woman had remarked casually that Mr. Gardiner was looking seedy, that was all; but then no one but Lettice held the key.

If his frankness surprised her, it surprised himself more, for he had by no means intended to mention Dorothea. He sheered off the subject in a hurry. "I've been up here most evenings lately," he said. "Madame Hasquin has a bureau on which I've set my heart; she means me to have it in the end, but I can't get her to terms. No, it's not the money, it's the fun—sheer delight in bargaining. I don't mind. It's rather jolly up here in the evenings, you get the sunset; and it's soul-refreshingly lonely. This wood—you'd never guess there was a house within five minutes, would you? Stand still a moment."

He laid his hand on her arm to detain her, and the silence fell on them like a pall. Not a leaf stirred; the firs raised their black spikes rigid against the sky, some erect, some doubled and contorted like ogres. Brambles, crouching low, thrust out long stealthy clutching claws across the track. The sky was golden, and gold were the strips of water lying in the ruts, winding away to the open hill and safety; but the wood was dark, dark, and already in its depths, here and there, a glow-worm had lit its tiny keen speck of unearthly fire, glass-green, steady, burning but unconsumed. "That's the way to the cave," murmured Gardiner, his voice dropping, his grip tightening on her arm. "Cosas de brujas—witches, I mean. Never tell me a wood isn't alive!"

He meant it. Lettice, who professed to be stolid, found herself responding to his fancy with an involuntary thrill. There was something wrong about the place; it had its finger on its lip; it seemed to hold a secret of its own, to threaten them with it, to jeer at their unforeseeing ignorance.